Oversoul
The Tentacled One
You're making two unwarranted assumptions here, one of which I suspect is right anyway and one of which I know is sometimes wrong. You're assuming that definitions on Wiktionary are contributions by individuals and not group efforts. Most of them probably are. I don't know the exact percentages, but it seems pretty likely that the "gaming" definition of "broken" was the contribution of an individual. However, your second assumption, that definitions in standard dictionaries are written by groups of people, is often wrong. Lexicographers write entries on their own all the time. I'd like to think that editors comb over everything thoroughly, but they don't and even if they did, one writer composing a dictionary entry and one editor going over that entry doesn't really constitute a "group of people deciding on the definition" (and Wiktionary has editors too, for that matter). I'm sure certain dictionary items have some sort of committee discussion, but not being a lexicographer myself, I don't know what protocol are followed or how often this happens.Spiderman;278319 said:True, but there's a difference between one person writing the definition for a dictionary vs a group of people deciding on the definition (which is presumably what happens with a "standard" dictionary)
Okay, I'm being a bit pedantic again here. What you're saying seems fair enough. But I don't see these "fears." We start off with BB saying that Tezz seems like a card that could be broken, pointing out some possible uses like synergies with affinity, then me pointing out the Time Vault combo followed by discussion for the rest of the first page on the fact that the erratum on Time Vault was indeed changed again.Right. And the article implied that. It was in contrast with the Tezzeret thread for fears that it WOULD be dominating.
Second page starts with me talking about how Time Vault was preemptively restricted and pointing out (because of Ransac's last post on the first page) that a ban in Vintage for power-level reasons is unlikely, then some more discussion of errata and history with the seeming consensus from everyone speaking up that removing power-level errata was a good thing. There's one post where YOU say, "I agree, but along with it being more powerful, presumably there's also more ways of dealing with it. The Vintage scene is fast anyways, right? So getting both pieces of the combo to get extra turns would be good work in itself." That could kinda sorta be interpreted as a "fear that it would be dominating." I don't know. That's not how I interpreted it. Was that what you were expressing?
Then there's some more about power-level errata and how they're bad for new players. There's a post where I compare Vault/Key to other two-card combos and kind of conclude that it's better than basically all of them (I still think so) and that this was most of the reasoning behind the preemptive restriction, and then I say that Tezzeret, despite being slower and more expensive, does have the advantage of fetching the Vault and untapping it all by itself, noting that "I'm interested to see how well it does." That is definitely not a fear that it will dominate.There's you stating that there's a big difference between a combo with a restricted component and one without any restricted components, which I guess I only tacitly agreed with.
Then 13NoVa asserted that Tezz was "broken as hell" and then went on to state that "But he's also one of the worst cards in the deck. He definitely is vintage playable, though." While I now realize that you apparently believe dominance is requisite for something to be "broken," it seems clear from the way that 13NoVa phrased things in his post that dominance wasn't what he meant. The statement about it being the worst card in the deck struck me as meaning that it was something of a necessary evil. The deck uses Tezzeret to win, but it's really the other cards in the deck that do actual legwork. I later compared this to the role of Donate in Necro-Donate decks. Anyway, noting that Tezz is Vintage-playable seems to be a pretty good indication that 13NoVa wasn't afraid of a dominance problem. He also cited a decklist he used in a tournament where he made it to the top eight. If it were dominance he were worried about, there'd be more. Like a citation of a top eight filled with Tezzeret decks or a statement that Tezzeret is winning all of the tournaments in his area.
There's you asking about the Vault/Key combo, me stating that it's used in Tezzeret decks (and it's now being used in another deck that uses stuff like Intuition/Reconstruction to find the combo, by the way) and 13NoVa mentioning that he used Tezzeret's ultimate against Null Rod to bash the opponent for 35.
The third page starts out kind of silly, with two people comparing Tezzeret to Elspeth. I don't know if they were thinking of a different format or what. The third page kind of drifts into you asking about the "combo" and me not being sure, because of the way you're wording things, if you're asking about Vault/Key outside of Tezzeret decks or not. From there the thread goes to you asking 13NoVa about the 2008 year in review and if he saw it and stuff like that.
Where were these "fears"? I didn't see them and I still don't.
"Trumps" = ">"
That broken and overpowering meant different things.
On that last one, are you talking about "broken > overpowered"? As for that and the rest of these, I did mention this in my response to BigBlue, but perhaps it's worth repeating...I already defined it back somewhere on the first 30 posts.
"Broken > overpowered" CANNOT be true. It doesn't make sense. Not because that's not how it's used, but because there's no such thing as "greater than overpowered." The word "overpowered" indicates an assessment of something being more powerful than it should be. There is no upper limit on this, no point at which something is so powerful that it is no longer overpowered and needs a new word to describe it. Saying "greater than overpowered" is like saying "more than too much." If you need you one gallon of water and I bring you a half gallon of water, you would say that I brought you "too little water." If I bring you a gallon of water, you might say that it's "enough water." If I bring you five gallons of water, you might say that it's "too much water." If I bring you a trillion gallons of water, you would not say that it's "not too much water." You might modify "too much" by saying that it's "way too much water" or "far too much water" or something of that nature. But those modifications don't mean that it's no longer too much water, they're just specifying the degree to which it is too much.
If you're saying that "broken" is like that and that it specifies that something is greatly overpowered, rather than just plain old overpowered, then you're saying that "broken" is a subset of "overpowered." In this case "broken > overpowered" is incorrect. Broken IS overpowered, but overpowered is not necessarily broken.
Oh, and while I'm at it, in the event that "> overpowered" actually was what you meant for the definition of broken (I'm still not sure that it was, but I'm thinking that this is the case), besides not making sense, that's also not a definition. It's just stating something about the word. You would, I hope, agree that "> small" is not an adequate definition for "big."